Create a recess so he can do recess appointments?

McConnell Dismisses Trump’s Call to Adjourn Congress to Make Federal Appointments

President Trump raised the possibility that he could invoke Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution to adjourn Congress in order to make recess federal appointments, a never-before-used presidential power that Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) suggested he would not support.

Trump proposed during the White House coronavirus press briefing on Wednesday that we would use his “very strong power” to “exercise my Constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress.”

But it is not a power to adjourn congress ad lib.

He can only do it if and when the two houses of congress cannot agree on a time of adjournment, and nothing of the sort is happening or in prospect.

Article II Section 3 reads in pertinent part

. . . in Case of Disagreement between them [the two houses of congress], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he [the president] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper . . .

All the same, Trump is rightly frustrated because though the congress is already in recess, making the power to adjourn them irrelevant, anyway, at the same time it pretends not to be in a manner intended precisely and only to prevent recess appointments.

Something that annoyed the heck out of O, back in the day, and that the Supremes endorsed against him.

Congress, currently in recess until May 4, is still having pro-forma sessions in which any lawmaker can object to a motion — preventing the president from pushing through vacancy appointments.

“The current practice of leaving town while conducting phony pro forma sessions is a dereliction of duty the American people can’t afford during this crisis,” Trump said. “They have been warned.”

. . . .

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case against a 2012 attempt by then-President Barack Obama to make three recess appointments during pro-forma sessions, saying “that the Recess Appointment Clause does not give the President the constitutional authority to make the appointments here at issue.”